The second video in our series of XR headset teardowns is the RayNeo Air 3S – this is a much newer unit, having launched in April of this year. I wanted to grab a pair and dig into the display & optics hardware because of the impressive price point that RayNeo was able to achieve while using the same 1080p, 0.6″ OLED microdisplays as most of their competitors.

Overall, it’s a very comfortable pair of AR glasses for use as a large head-mounted monitor. You can imagine that there’s no onboard processing or battery at this price point, something that I don’t think necessarily holds back the use of this headset for some mild content consumption like watching videos or gaming with the Air 3S’ plugged into your device of choice. If 3DoF and pinning of the display in-space is a must have for you, I can’t recommend this pair of glasses – it is truly just two screens stuck to your face and there’s no real way around that like Nebula for Xreals without onboard processing.

That said, the optical engineering is solid and worth a look below:

While not explicitly called out in the video, the number one improvement from a display perspective is the onboard option to down-sample to 60Hz – while 120Hz is obviously better across the board for the user, if you want to extend battery life of your phone or game console while using these glasses, it is not a trivial savings to switch the display refresh rate to 60Hz. In early tests, you can get a 10-15% less power draw from the unit depending on the brightness you need and the difference from low brightness 60Hz to high brightness 120Hz is so big that you can get up to 50% longer battery life opting for the lower refresh rate – not a bad deal when talking about a screen that likely uses as much power as your phone while watching videos.

Since the optical path is unchanged from the Xreal Airs, the schematic below is still a great reference for how this birdbath optical design works.